Inside Sales Hub: A Bold New Path to Revenue Acceleration | INBOUND 2025

Hello, everyone. Welcome to day two of Inbound 2025. I don't know about all of y', all, but I think day one set a pretty high watermark for the day, all the great product innovation and things that are going on. So we have some pretty big shoes to fill here in day two. But I'm excited to get the opportunity to do that with you. And first off, I want to thank everyone here for joining us for this deep dive into Sales Hub, where we're going to be exploring some features that we've launched for y', all, as well as talking through the new strategy the teams have that are able to accelerate their revenue group with Sales Hub. There you go. So I see a bunch of friendly faces in the audience. A couple are here. I see some partners, some things. But for those of who I haven't had a chance to meet, my name is Michael Walton, and I'm our GM and VP of product for our Sales Hub product line. And so I've been fortunate enough to be at HubSpot for over five and a half years now. And before that, I was a longtime customer. So this is, amazingly my 10th inbound that I've been to. I can say without question that, like, Inbound is one of my most favorite times of the year. It truly is. I, like, I just get so energized by the conversations that I get to have with all of you. Hearing about the successes that you've had to date, hearing a little bit more about those challenges as well. It's those conversations that we end up having that inspire all the things that we go and we build into Sales Hub for all of you. And, you know, this year, all of that's still true. Although what I can say is that this year is those conversations have had a pretty marked shift as well. Now we're still hearing about the wins. We're definitely still hearing about the challenges they all have. But what we're also hearing about is what it takes to operate in this new age of AI, Right? And that shift that I just mentioned, we're actually seeing a lot of that shift in our numbers as well. So our customers, which is all of you, you've just been very, incredibly busy with Sales Hub. So to date, you've closed over 660, or, sorry, 764 million deals. Think of all that revenue that's been generated through those deals. And in terms of AI, last year at this time, we launched our prospecting agent into beta, and since then, all of you have used it to send 1.3 million AI powered emails and on top of that, you've used it to research over 1 million accounts. Think of all that time that's been saved thanks to AI. And while look, these numbers are very impressive. They are. It's not just about productivity anymore. Right? When we're hearing from teams, we're hearing from teams who are seeing real impact right now. Teams like Bradley from Reseller Ratings, who says our prospecting agent is crafting emails that are already outperforming in their US based reps. Or Tillman, who's a sales ops leader for Aerotech, whose team is saving countless hours right now using our AI tools. Right? These aren't just efficiency wins anymore. These are transformation stories that we're hearing. Teams are able to fundamentally change how they're operating thanks to some of these wins. Now, when we have all these conversations at which all of the feedback we got was only bunnies and rainbows, but we can be honest, it's not. But it is really clear for us where we need to spend our time and where we need to improve. What we hear is, we hear that finding the right prospects at the right time, it's still too hard and it takes too much time for y'. All. All right? We're also hearing that prepping for and following up on your sales meetings, it's eating up productivity instead and getting this opportunity to enhance it. And this last one, this one's painful because it feels ever persistent, but getting proper visibility into everything that your team is actually doing on a day to day basis, it's still more challenging than it needs to be. Now these here, they're not just small problems, but they are the type of challenges that have inspired everything that we're going to show you today. But I will say it goes beyond just our product. All right? Those challenges mean that for people like Sarah, who's a director of Rev Ops at a growing SaaS company, right now she's faced with this impossible situation in the market. She has her leadership that's asking her to do more with less, but at the same time, she's got to hit bigger numbers and she's been given fewer reps to do so. All while prospects right now in the market, they're harder to reach than they've ever been before. And at the same time, deals are taking longer to close. I don't know, but for anybody. Does this thing sound familiar? Does this situation. I know about half of you in the audience right now, so I know for a fact that actually does. And it's unfortunate. It really is right now. Here's what the data is telling us though, about what Sarah and teams like her are facing. Right. The first thing that they see is their reps. They're just drowning in busywork right now. The stat we have is they're only able to spend 28% of their day actively selling. That's horrible that so much of a time and productivity suck. Second, the teams aren't able to scale efficiently. They have more customer data and AI tools than they know what to do with, but they're still making decisions in the dark. They got 10 different tools, each with different data silos. This poor data quality, it's their biggest challenge and they're killing them right now. All right, and third, there's what we call this data without insight. Problem AI is out here and it's supposed to make things easier. But it still takes months to ramp up a new sales rep and we're seeing that 67% of teams are struggling to hit their quota. This is the reality that Sarah and peers that she has are living in. And right now, I don't feel like it's sustainable. It's wildly unsustainable for y'. All. There is one thing I want to be clear though, when we're talking about this is all those challenges that we just talked about, it doesn't mean that the fundamentals of selling have actually changed. Great salespeople, they still need to be able to master discovery, build authentic relationships, sell consultatively, that's what they need to do. They need to handle objections with confidence, manage their pipeline efficiently, and most importantly, follow up consistently. These here, these are these core skills. They're still the fundamentals of sales success. But the thing that has changed here is how we can now amplify and scale these skills for salespeople. Because what we've learned is that AI, it's a multiplier for these core sales skills. It can help you discover insights faster, it can build those relationships more systematically for you. It can help guide consultative conversations, surface effective objective responses, keep those pipelines flowing automatically and ensure follow ups that they never fall through the cracks. This right here, this is where the magic happens. So we can take that human expertise and we can combine it with the power of AI. And that's exactly what we've been building for y'. All. What we are building is digital agents, AI agents. These are digital teammates that work autonomously and are easy to use for your team. We're also building AI assistants. These help your reps deliver results fast. And we've also Embedded smart AI features directly into your rep and your team's workflows that are unified by default across the entire platform. This isn't about adding more tools to your AI stack and it's about giving your team the actual intelligence and assistance that they need to hit their actual goals. This is what Sarah needs and this is what we're going to show you right now. We're going to start off with building Pipeline and all the tools we built to help your teams prospect smarter. Now, I mentioned this before, but last year at this time we introduced the prospecting agent in beta. And well over the last year or so it's evolved into something much bigger and much grander. Think of it right now as your ultimate virtual pipe generation teammate. And here's what it can do for you. First up is deep account research. The agent can analyze thousands of different data points. So it goes down. It's pulling from websites, from news, from your CRM history, and it helps your reps deeply understand the pains, the prospect's pains and opportunities they have. And it does so in a matter of minutes instead of hours. Second, and this might be my whole favorite of the presentation is always on signals powered outreach. So the agent can now listen to intent signals and it can adapt its outreach strategy based on what's happening in those signals. So it can determine if it should leverage that signal to adapt its outreach to achieve the goals that you've set out for it. And then it can tailor that message that it sends out based on the specific details of that signal. And the cool part is it'll do this 24 7. So it listens and engages the prospects that you have exactly when they're showing intent so striking well, the opportunities are hot and interest is there. It's going to really help build pipeline continuously. And one last piece here is that it can adapt its approach specifically to your business. So you offer different products or maybe you have different positioning that you want to pitch out or you might have different customer segments that you want to adapt to differently. We give the offer something called advanced selling profiles and can you and you configure those with simple prompt based instructions that again map the prospect agent to exactly the needs of your business. And last, definitely not least, the prospecting agent is follow up. What the agent can do is maintain consistent touch points for you and it can learn from all the successful sales patterns, the things that have happened in the past, and it can scale outreach without needing to add additional headcount. We mentioned that Sarah has that position and challenge earlier Right. This isn't just automation. We think this is intelligent prospecting. And, and the cool thing is that it never sleeps. So let's see it in action and get to some live demo in here. Sorry, I should say recorded demo, but we're going to walk through. So this is the sales workspace where a rep can see all of their active accounts that they have. And what we'll see here is that we're going to dive into Nvidia. All right? And we see Nvidia, we see that it's showing some intent signals. These are the intent signals I mentioned before that the agent can listen to and adapt its outreach strategy for. So we see that they follow some leadership content and recently done some geographic expansion. This seems good enough that I want to go and enroll Nvidia into the prospecting agent. So what I'll do here is I'll go up to our buying committee tab and I'll find the RevOps director. Her name's Winnie, and I'm going to roll her to the agent. What you'll see next is our agent enrollment screen. It shows all the options and settings for the agent, as well as gives you a preview of what the agent might send out. Now, before I mentioned that the prospect also does deep account research for you. You can do that in a CRM, but you can also do that here. So the example of this is we start research, it's going out to the web and what it's doing is pulling a comprehensive summary of this customer. So things like its value propositions, the product that it's offered, the tech stat, everything that your rep needs to get the proper context for this company and their outreach. Now, once this research is done, and it's pretty amazing, we're going to go back to enrolling the prospecting agent. We'll go back to the agent writer. The first thing we'll do here is we're going to change the selling profile. And I want to do a follow up after inbound 2025. So I changed the selling profile. I applied it. What you see is the agent right there went in and it adapted its outreach strategy. So it customizes outreach based on that specific profile. So I'm going to roll it in the agent and that's all the rep has to do. It's simple and easy. But let's go now see what the prospecting agent is doing behind the scenes. To do that, we go over to the prospecting agent app and what we'll see is a list of all the accounts that are actively Enrolled on the prospecting agent. And you see at the top we have Winnie there and the agent behind the scenes is doing all that research that we mentioned and eventually here she's going to draft the first outreach to them. There we go. Now the cool thing here is we can go in and we can review the conversation. We'll go over here and click on the right and what this shows, it shows every decision and every piece of content that the agent has sent with high level of explainability so you can build that accountability and trust with the agent. That's really important. Now one last thing I want to show here is how easy it is to customize the agent. I mentioned that we have selling profiles. So if I go into account setup, we're going to change a selling profile here and we're going to add what we call custom instructions. These are simple prompt based instructions that tell the agent how to adapt its outreach based on that particular profile. We're going to add something super simple here that says, hey, add in a positive affirmation at the end of this outreach, but can do much more complex things. You can guide on how to adapt its tone or even dive in and say, hey, adapt the messaging length based on the seniority of the prospect. So we're going to add that in here. Always end each email with a positive affirmation and then we're going to apply that change to the agent settings. And what we're also going to be able to do is now see a preview of what it actually did and how those instructions adapted its outreach. So we'll be in go and we'll be able to preview this inside and we'll say, yes, it did adapt to the instructions that I gave it with regards to tone. That's awesome. We're going to go on to the second email here in just a second and we'll see how it's also adapted to add that positive affirmation at the end of the thing. Now again, those are simple instructions, but this is just a brief showing of all the power that frosty agent can bring to your teams, whether it's going to really help you build pipeline more effectively. Now, beyond the prospecting agent, we've also built some other features that are going to level up your team's prospecting. And the first to start with is what we call buying signals. So you had a chance to see some of this when we just did that agent demo, but what these are is they help you find companies in your CRM that are most likely to listen to your Pitch right now. So instead of the reps having to go through and read a ton of different news articles or analyzing a bunch of things, what we do is we analyze intent data, look at recent news, and find engagement patterns that let your reps know and give them that quick indication, hey, is this person looking in the market right now? Because when they're having to make 50 calls a day or do 50 outreach, you want to maximize your chances of success by people finding people who are actively ready to buy. So that's buying signals second up. And this is a fun one. This has been a long term ask is our new power dialer. This is our new native high velocity calling experience that's built for reps who want to move fast. So with one click, it queues up all your calls and then automatically dials them with minimum clicks and maximum efficiency. So no more having to juggle between multiple screens or logging calls manually to see what happened. It's just pure focus for your reps on having those conversations. And last and certainly not least, this is one of my favorite aspects of prospecting is something we call buying groups. So when we look at all the past data, we see that the average buying decision takes into account six to 10 different stakeholders. But what we're seeing is that most reps are only engaging between one or two folks. So there's a huge disconnect there. But now what we have with buying groups is we'll analyze all your CRM data and all your past conversations and what we'll do is we'll build a comprehensive organizational map for you and then we'll help you find warm paths to the key stakeholders and then help you execute the multi threaded outreach to keep those deals progressing like they should. For any of you out there that has maybe a complex sales process or dealing with large buying committees, this is going to be a legitimate game changer for you and we're really excited about it. Now, those are all some of the great updates that we have with regards to prospecting. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about closing deals or how we're helping the reps turn all of that smarter prospecting that they just did into actual revenue. Now first, and probably most importantly, let's talk about sales meetings. We mentioned this in some of the pain points earlier, but this is important because the reality is that every sales conversation you have is an opportunity to either accelerate that deal or unfortunately lose it entirely. And right now when we see reps, they're just, they're not going into a lot of these conversations anywhere near as prepared as they could be. We saw the stat earlier that said they only get 20% of their time actively selling. They're just bogged down in busy work, right? So they have limited time to focus and getting prepared for those meetings at the same time. During the meetings they're having to frantically take notes and capture all the details of the calls instead of being able to actively listen and, and engage with the prospect like they should. And then afterwards, and this is super unfortunate, but it still takes an inordinate sorry amount of time to go back in and update the CRM, identify all the next steps and follow up on them. Right? That's hours of admin work for every single meeting. And so we decided to build something to help change that. And that is our new AI powered meeting experience. And what it does is it handles the end to end sales meeting lifecycle. So preparing reps with complete context before they walk into those conversations and then capturing key insights during the call so they can stay focused on the conversation that they need to be. And then it follows up with actual next steps the moment that the meeting ends. Think about it. What if every sales meeting that you have could turn from an admin task into a competitive advantage for you? And what I'm going to do is show you exactly how this works. So when reps come into HubSpot, they connect their calendar and it gives us access to all the upcoming meetings that they have and their future meetings. But we can also go into the experience and schedule a meeting right here as well. So what we're gonna do here is we're gonna schedule a meeting with Steve, we're gonna call it a prep call meeting and get that on the calendar. Now what we're gonna do now is we're gonna go over to the sales workspace and you will see that schedule that I mentioned. And what it shows for you is all the prep meetings that you have that you prep for and also all the follow up meetings. So we'll do that, we go to summary and we'll go to schedule. All right, and what we're going to do is kick off, we're going to dive into that prep call that I mentioned. We see. Now look at this here. This is our personalized meeting prep experience and has everything you need to prepare right here. So notes and pain points and all of these are generated with AI. Now what's actually happening behind the high scenes is pretty cool. We've gone in and we're looking at all your CRM activities. We're looking at the calls, we're looking at the emails and, and we're giving super tailored pain points. So if you dive in and look at this, Steve's team is struggling with inefficient data processing, outdated CRM interface and forecasting inaccuracies. That's not generic research, right? That's actually intelligently pulled from everything in the past conversations. In addition to that, we can give a summary of all the recent activity. A lot of times we have to have to go in and read all the emails and contexts that happened before and it takes up time. This saves it. So now if we're happy with prep, we're going to fast forward a little bit and we're going to go into follow up. All right. And we'll dive into one of the meetings here. So this right here is where deals can live or die. And what I do, you can go in, you can see the full transcript of the conversation, the talk track, you can review the entire conversation. But more importantly is it will give you an AI summary over here on the left, so it includes keynotes, but also to have here the topics discussed and most important points to call out. And if you want to learn more at the end here, you can ask it a question. And what this does is bring in our breeze assistant to help answer any particular questions and go in more depth that you want to. But here's the part that's really key and this is where we're trying to solve that follow up problem that I mentioned earlier. These right here are AI generated next steps that come out directly from the meeting. So showing us exactly what we need to do to close this deal and to follow up effectively. These are not generic next steps, but they are specific actions based on what actually happened in the conversation. And from here we can send those next steps directly to Steve and close out this meeting properly. Because at the end of the day, it's these details, it's this follow up is what separates the deals that close from the deals that don't. This right here, this is what I meant when I talked about turning every sales meeting into a competitive advantage for you instead of a wasted admin task. Now, beyond sales meetings, we've also done other work to make our selling more effective, starting with AI deal intelligence. This has gotten a lot smarter and it did so by now being conversation powered. So what we do is something like our predictive deal score now not only looks at just your CRM history, but analyzes all of your past conversations to help you understand the health of a deal. And what we can also do is pull out the key factors and call out the positive or negative factors that are impacting this deal's progress. So your reps always know exactly the right deals to focus on to move across the line. In addition to that, our deal insights feature also got conversation powered. So in addition to looking at CRM data, we're mining all the conversations, the calls you've had, the emails and the meetings. And we're able to do is identify things like buyer goals for this opportunity. It can even extract out and do this proactively. Deal risks. So all the things that are changing with regards to the deal, like here, it's looking at the change in a key decision maker or pulling out recent sentiments all from past conversations, so your reps can know which deals that they need to go in and identify and mitigate those risks. This is gonna help you all get that sales momentum that we've been talking about. Now here's the thing about momentum though. It honestly, it really is everything in sales. So your reps have done all of this hard work to get to a decision, right? They had these great discovery calls, they built the proper rapport, they even got the prospect to say, yes, I'm ready to move forward. The next step though is they have to go switch to a different system and create a quote. Once that quote's created, they gotta wait for a bunch of set of approvals. Once the approvals are done, they have to send this like static PDF off to somebody to get a quote and what happens then is silence, right? They just wait, you know, and this happens. The deal stalls and momentum dies. Now that's a nightmare case, but it happens way more often than than we expected to happen. And we have a plan to fix that. And how we're going to do that with our new AI powered CPQ available in Commerce Hub. So what we do is use all the context from your past conversations and we use AI to automatically generate a quote for you. And now these new quotes are much more powerful than the quotes we've had in the past. They support more types of products and pricing options. And then you can chat with the quote to do things like generate a cover letter or add a discount or pay the payment types. It's super powerful. And maybe the most cool thing about this is when you share these new quotes with your customers, it comes with a closing agent directly integrated into the quote experience that can answer Your customers questions 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It's just to ensure that Momentum that you've created, it never gets lost and it keeps going. It's going to be a huge improvement for your customers. Now those are just some of the new features that we added to help your team's prospect smarter and sell more efficiently and close faster with AI. But what about your sales leaders? Remember there was a pointed piece of feedback earlier in the conversation that said their sales leaders are really, they're still struggling to see the bigger picture. They need to understand how their team is performing, they want to identify where the risks are and they want to be able to understand who needs coaching at what moments. And they need to do so without spending hours jumping between different reports and different dashboards. So to help this, we built a command center for managing team performance and for driving revenue results. This here is the sales performance workspace. This new experience brings together everything a sales leader leads in one place. So it can help you track individual and team goals and progress against those goals in real time. It also surfaces AI powered insights around deal risks and performance trends. And the cool part is it does proactively so you're not diving in and looking all around. And then you can go in and drill into any of those particular insights that we surface for you that to get a better understanding of what's really happening so you can see what's happening in your pipeline where your reps might need more coaching. And again, you do so all without having to jump between a bunch of different reports and dashboards to get that answer. This right here is AI coaching intelligence at your fingertips. And we think it's going to be a game changer for sales leaders. So remember Sarah who I mentioned earlier, the one who is out there being caught between having to deliver more with less. Well, Sarah isn't meant to be just one person, right? Sarah represents all the rev ops leader out there who are tasked right now with delivering the impossible. Now we think because every one of you is also facing that same impossible equation, you have more pressure, fewer resources, longer sales cycle and prospects are harder to reach than ever. But what if that equation could be changed to your advantage, right? And what we've shown today, it isn't meant just to be products updates and meant to be a smarter way of selling. So going from drowning an admin to letting AI handle the heavy lifting from lost deal insights to nothing getting lost ever. From disconnected tools to unified platform insights, this is how you break the old equation and that you write a new one. And you know what? It's working already. So teams like Ving, they're booking meetings with cold leads. They've been emailing for over a year now. Thanks to our prospecting agent and Charles River Apparel, they're using our Deal Hill score to focus on exactly where they need. And our reps over at Sandow, they're being able to stay focused with proactive AI, next steps and context that they need to progress and move their deals forward. These aren't just promises. These are real results that are happening right now. All right, this right here, this is a bold new path to revenue acceleration. But it isn't just a vision. It's here, it's real, and it's ready for your team. So I want to thank everyone here for their time and what I want to do is invite you to join us over at the Sales Hub demo booth. If you have more questions. At the same time, you can also catch us on the Spotlight stage. I think we have deeper dive sessions into both the prospecting agent again and more about the meeting assistance. And again, thank all of you for the time and learning about Sales Hub. Love to see you over at the Sales Hub demo station and talk more.